Rangers finally playing like a playoff-contending team
Reilly Smith of the Rangers celebrates his third-period goal against the Philadelphia Flyers with teammate Will Cuylle at Madison Square Garden on Thursday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
With the Rangers having stitched together a 10-game point streak that pulled them out of the deep hole into which they fell in November and December and put them within a whisper of a playoff spot, is it safe to say they are back to being what they were always supposed to be, a top team in the league?
Not quite yet, probably. They’re still just outside of the playoff field at the moment. But going 7-0-3 in a brutal gantlet in their schedule in which they beat high-end teams such as Vegas and the Devils and earned points against top Western Conference teams Dallas and Colorado, the Rangers do look as though they should reach the postseason. And that is the first step.
There was a time, when they went 4-15 in the final 19 games of 2024 and fell into last place in the Metropolitan Division, when that hardly seemed like a sure thing. But Filip Chytil refused to believe the Rangers might fall so far that they would miss the playoffs.
“I was not concerned,’’ Chytil insisted at Thursday’s morning skate before the Rangers beat the Flyers at Madison Square Garden. “Of course, it's not nice to have this [poor] record and be last in the division when last year we won the Presidents' Trophy. But the team is almost the same, and you just don't forget to play hockey in a couple months . . . The season is long, but it was just that streak. And now you can see we’re finally playing how we should play and winning the games.’’
Chytil scored a goal in the Rangers’ 6-1 win that night, two nights after their 5-0 win over Ottawa. That gave them an aggregate score of 11-1 in two games against teams they are battling for a playoff spot and allowed them to relax after nearly two months of a tense, nervous locker room.
Everything is clicking for them right now. Goalie Igor Shesterkin has won four straight starts and is 6-0-1 with a 1.39 goals-against average, a .948 save percentage and two shutouts since coming off injured reserve with an upper-body injury.
The team in front of him is playing better as well, both defensively and offensively. The Rangers have reduced their shots against slightly since the Christmas break, allowing an average of 29.0 per game in 14 games after giving up 31.9 in their first 34 games. They have scored 43 goals in January, the most in the league as of Friday. Even the fourth line has produced six goals in the last eight games, beginning with Sam Carrick’s OT goal to beat the Devils on Jan. 9.
The job isn’t done yet, though. Thirty-four games remain, beginning with Sunday’s matinee against Colorado at the Garden, and the mega-trade the Carolina Hurricanes pulled off Friday — acquiring forwards Mikko Rantanen from Colorado and Taylor Hall from Chicago — puts even more pressure on the Rangers to keep playing the way they’re playing now, as opposed to the way they were playing last month.
“When we were 4-15 . . . we did some damage there,’’ coach Peter Laviolette said last week. “And so it's been, now, a journey to get back to pushing to be in the playoffs. And we still have a tremendous amount of work to do. There's a lot of good hockey that we still need to play in order to keep going.
“But I like the way that we're playing, and I feel like . . . we're in a position [in which] we just keep focusing on ourselves and we can continue to climb the ladder,’’ Laviolette said. “The guys are playing a brand of hockey that I feel like can be successful, but there's a lot that goes into that . . . It requires focus and detail, and energy, execution, speed, attitude — all the things that can make a team great.
“That's going to be required on a nightly basis.’’
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
